Crushpath Gets $2M To Help Salespeople Seal The Deal: Charles River Ventures And More Are Backing | Square builds new loyalty features into its Register and Pay-with-Square apps | How collective intelligence is reshaping systems management | Amiando Founder Departs After Earn-Out, As Eventbrite Eyes-Up European Growth | Kabam acquires indie maker of Realm of the Mad God web game (exclusive)

With all of the M&A activity going down with CRM leviathans Oracle and Salesforce, a timely launch from a new startup looking to disrupt the sales process once again. Crushpath, founded by former executives from Jive Software and Socialcast, is offering a platform for salespeople to control a deal from lead to close, with social elements added into the mix, and it has closed a $2 million round of seed funding led by Charles River Ventures to do it.Other investors include Chamath Social + Capital Partnership, the former VP of Facebook, Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez, Jive CEO Dave Hersh and Box’s CEO Aaron Levie. Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, is also joining Crushpath’s board[...]

Mobile payments startup Square has added new loyalty features to its Square Register and Pay-with-Square apps to get more people to keep coming back to Square merchants, the company announced this morning.Last week, Square announced that it now has 2 million merchants accepting payments through its service. On top of this core payments business, the company is working on other ways to change how consumers and businesses deal with transactions. The Register app for iPad helps companies ditch their cash registers and the�Pay with Square app on iOS and Android makes it possible for consumers to pay at Square merchants without pulling their wallets (or phones) out of their pockets.Now those ap[...]

Big data has always had a place in the world of systems management, but it might have found its sweet spot in the cloud. While there are plenty of tools available for analyzing data on how your physical resources are operating in your data center, it’s still a lot of work and it’s not easy to truly figure out what’s going on. You could think of it like a Yakov Smirnoff joke: In data center, you discover insights. In cloud, insights discover you.What that means is that companies providing cloud computing and cloud services can tap into the experiences of all their customers to give everyone a sense of what’s going on. Nand Mulchandani, co-founder and CEO of SaaS start[...]

Well, that’s that. Prominent German entrepreneur Felix Haas, who started ticketing company Amiando and sold it to XING (Germany’s LinkedIn), has finished his earn-out period and is, as the phrase goes, out of here. Speaking exclusively to TechCrunch from Le Web London, he said “I’m going to fly planes for a bit. Then I’ll decide what to do.” (Haas flies light aircraft for fun). In his stead comes Norbert Stockman, a seasoned manager in the ticketing industry, who becomes the new MD, and Julian de Grahl, currently a VP at XING.Haas leaves in September with the other founders Dennis von Ferenczy, Sebastian B�rhold and Armin Bauer also off to “seek new[...]

Kabam has acquired Wild Shadow Studios, the maker of popular online combat game Realm of the Mad God. The deal shows that Kabam, a maker of hardcore social online games, continues its quest to pick up titles that are played by hardcore gamers regardless of platform.Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Kabam was drawn to the game because so many of its own employees were playing the action-packed, web-based game, said Andrew Sheppard, president of Kabam’s Game Studios, in an interview with GamesBeat.Sheppard describes the game as a “massively multiplayer bullet hell” game where you gather a bunch of pixellated characters and open fire on the big bad guy, letting as many b[...]